Re: Data::Dumper in reference to Hashes

[chargrill]

I don't know, the first sentence in the Data::Dumper page seems pretty clear to me:

Data::Dumper - stringified perl data structures, suitable for both printing and eval

Stringified may not be a real word, but it means "turned into a string" (which according to the Oxford Dictionary, is "a linear sequence of characters, words, or other data").

Perl Data Structure is pretty straightforward - it's a structured hunk of data in perl.

Suitable for printing means you can print it.

Suitable for eval means you can copy and paste it as valid perl code.

Try a few things:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = ( 'test' => 'one', 'next' => 'two' );

print Dumper \%hash;

__OUTPUT__
$VAR1 = {
          'next' => 'two',
          'test' => 'one'
        };